News behind the news. This picture is me (white spot) standing on the bridge connecting European and North American tectonic plates. It is located in the Reykjanes area of Iceland. By-the-way, this is a color picture.

Tag Archives: Climate

Wattsupwiththat posted an article today about some recent climate news. Global warming is simply not living up to the expectations of the computer predictions.

The article states:

A scientific consensus has emerged among top mainstream climate scientists that “skeptics” or “lukewarmers” were not long ago derided for suggesting — there was a nearly two-decade long “hiatus” in global warming that climate models failed to accurately predict or replicate.A new paper, led by climate scientist Benjamin Santer, adds to the ever-expanding volume of “hiatus” literature embracing popular arguments advanced by skeptics, and even uses satellite temperature datasets to show reduced atmospheric warming.

More importantly, the paper discusses the failure of climate models to predict or replicate the “slowdown” in early 21st century global temperatures, which was another oft-derided skeptic observation.

The article explains:

Then, in early 2016, mainstream scientists admitted the climate model trends did not match observations — a coup for scientists like Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger who have been pointing out flaws in model predictions for years.

Christy’s research has shown climate models show 2.5 times more warming in the bulk atmosphere than satellites and weather balloons have observed.

Now, he and Santer seem to be on the same page — the global warming “hiatus” is real and the models didn’t see it coming.

Meanwhile, the climate is always changing. The earth’s climate has been changing since before man got here. The question is how much does the activity of man impact the climate. That is the answer we don’t have. It is always a good idea to clean up the air and water as much as possible. However, it is also a good idea to do anything possible to raise the standard of living in places where industrialization and modern sanitation has not yet taken hold. The idea behind the global warming panic was to shake down industrialized countries to give money to third-world countries run by tyrants. Very little of that money would go toward anything related to climate change and very little of that money would be used to alleviate poverty where it was sent. Now that the scientists have admitted that they don’t know why there is a hiatus in global warming, maybe we can all relax a little and go on with our lives.

The University of Manitoba has canceled its 2017 Arctic expedition because there is too much ice to execute the mission safely. The U of M headlines: “Large Canadian Arctic climate change study cancelled due to climate change.”

So too much ice is the result of climate change? I thought we were concerned about global warming. Generally speaking, global warming does not result in more ice.

After explaining how the extreme ice conditions made the expedition impossible, the University of Manitoba explains:

This experience, and climate change conditions currently affecting Churchill, Man., clearly illustrates that Canada is ill prepared to deal with the realities of climate change.

Someone needs to explain to these scientists that the climate has been changing constantly (and cyclically) since earth began. I refuse to believe climate predictions from people who have been consistently wrong for more than forty years. Does anyone remember ‘the coming ice age‘ headlines of the seventies?

“I wish the film had over-estimated the seriousness of the crisis, but unfortunately it actually underestimated how serious it is,” Gore told THR in an interview Thursday, just days before the 10th anniversary of his film.

The article lists some of the predictions made in the movie that have proven to be false. Here are a few:

Some of his more famous predictions, including that Mount Kilimanjaro would have no snow by 2016, were hilariously incorrect — and, yes, Kilimanjaro still has snow.

In 2014, The New American reported some of Al Gore’s other predictions that haven’t happened:

Five years ago at a UN Conference on Climate Change, Al Gore predicted that, global warming having reached such an unbridled pitch, the North Pole might be completely ice-free during the summer of 2014.

…The Danish Meteorological Institute‘s (DMI) Centre for Ocean and Ice closely monitors Arctic sea ice extent and publishes a monthly plot on its website. According to DMI, 2014 is the second summer in a row that the ice cap has expanded. Data from the U.S. National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC) agrees, showing 2014’s summer ice well within the average range for the years 1961-2010. In fact, NSIDC’s website points out an ice extent decline rate of “slightly less than the average” for the month of August.

To understand what the hype about global warming and carbon footprints is really about, all you need to do is follow the money. Unfortunately for those who tried to sell the climate change scam to Americans, the money hasn’t been what it was expected to be.

In 2009, The Canada Free Press ran an article about the funding and financial connections found in the Chicago Climate Exchange. The Chicago Climate Exchange was supposed to play a major role in the American economy once Congress passed cap-and-trade legislation that would regulate carbon emissions and grant carbon credits. The legislation did not pass, and the Chicago Climate Exchange closed in 2011. Many Democratic Congressmen lost large amounts of money when the Exchange closed–they had made investments figuring they could pass cap-and-trade legislation. If you follow the link to The Canada Free Press article, you can find out who was in on the scam and how it was supposed to work. There is an article on the closing of the Exchange in The New York Times in January 2011. I can almost guarantee that if a Democratic majority is elected in Congress in the near future we will see the Exchange magically reappear with as much corruption as was involved in its original founding.

The story of the Chicago Climate Exchange is only one example of how Congressmen who do not have principles will make investments that will benefit from legislation they plan to pass. That is not the way our government is supposed to work.

The website that I strongly recommend for accurate, scientific information on climate is wattsupwiththat.com.

The Church and science have been at odds in the past, but I really thought that times had changed. Well, I guess they haven’t. This article is based on two sources, one is an article posted at the Daily Caller today and the other was posted at the U.K. Independent today.

The article at the Daily Caller states that the data from the climate stations in the United States reveals that we have been in a ten-year cooling period. (There are people in the midwest and New England who would most definitely agree with that statement). NOAA has adjusted those numbers to make it appear that there has been no cooling period.

The article at the Daily Caller reports:

NOAA’s latest temperature update did not include USCRN (U.S. Surface Climate Observing Reference Networks) data. One reason for this may be that the USCRN stations only have about a decade of data on them, which could be considered too short of a time period to use them in their analysis.

It should also be noted that USCRN only covers the U.S., including Hawaii and Alaska, but the rest of the world lacks these high quality weather stations that don’t require temperatures to go through ex post facto adjustments by NOAA.

Skeptics, however, argue that USCRN data could deflate future arguments of rapid warming made by NOAA and others.

“So, since this state of the art network requires no adjustment, we can most surely trust the data presented by it. Right?” Watts (Anthony Watts, a veteran meteorologist and publisher of the science blog Watts Up With That) asked.

“While we seldom if ever see the USCRN mentioned in NOAA’s monthly and annual ‘State of the Climate’ reports to the U.S. public, buried in the depths of the [National Climatic Data Center] website, one can get access to the data and have it plotted,” Watts added. “We now have 10 years, a decade, of good data from this network and we are able to plot it.”

The bottom line here is that if you don’t manipulate the data, the areas of earth where we can get accurate temperature measurements have been cooling for the past ten years.

The article at the U.K. Independent dealt with the content of an upcoming Papal speech detailing the dire threat of climate change. I am truly surprised that the Pope has waded into the middle of this discussion.

The article at the U.K. Independent states:

Pope Francis is also extremely concerned about the prospect of mass migration of animals, plants and humans as global warming means they cannot function in their traditional habitat.

He calls for a new global political authority tasked with tackling the reduction of pollution and the development of poor countries and regions.

Although he accepts that there may be some natural causes of global warming, the pope lays most of the blame for climate change squarely at the feet of mankind.

“Humanity is called to take note of the need for changes in lifestyle and changes in methods of production and consumption to combat this warming or at least the human causes that produce and accentuate it,” he wrote.

The pope is very critical of anybody who stands in the way of tackling the problem of global warming – whether they are merely indifferent or actively sceptical.

“The attitudes that stand in the way of a solution, even among believers, range from negation of the problem, to indifference, to convenient resignation or blind faith in technical solutions,” he wrote.

It is unfortunate that the Pope has chosen to further the myth of man-made global warming. The Bible commands man to be stewards of the environment–it requires that man be responsible in using the earth’s resources. There is nothing about man being able to influence climate. The push to end global warming is nothing more than a push toward one-world control of world finances and resources combined with an attempt to blackmail those countries that are prosperous.

If the Pope truly wants to combat global poverty (as countries become more prosperous, they generally become more environmentally conscious) and help fight world poverty, he needs to come out in favor of private property rights. There are two things that economically successful countries have in common–one is equality under the law and the other is private property rights (see rightwinggranny). The problem is not greed or materialism–it’s government control of what should be free markets. A free-market economy benefits the rich and the poor. That would be a Papal doctrine I could support. Unfortunately, those people who like to be in control are generally against giving away that much freedom.

Now Mike Brakey, an engineering physicist and heat transfer specialist, has caught NOAA revising historic temperature data for Maine–as always, to make the past look cooler and the present warmer by comparison:

Over the last months I have discovered that between 2013 and 2015 some government bureaucrats have rewritten Maine climate history… (and New England’s and of the U.S.). This statement is not based on my opinion, but on facts drawn from NOAA 2013 climate data vs. NOAA 2015 climate data after they re-wrote it.

We need only compare the data. They cooked their own books.

The article includes a chart illustrating that fact. Please follow the link above the view the chart.

The article also includes the following graph:

We are paying taxpayer money to be lied to in order to promote a political agenda. It is time to take their money away.

One of the side effects of having a petulant person in the White House is that anytime someone contradicts the wishes of the White House there is retribution of some sort. This has now extended to the matter of Climate Change.

On Thursday, The Weather Channel posted an article entitled, “FEMA Won’t Help States That Don’t Plan For Climate Change.” Thank about that for a moment. The federal government should be willing to help all states in case of emergency. Climate Change is not settled science, and no natural catastrophe has ever been linked to climate change. In fact, as climate change believers howl about increased damage from hurricanes, the amount of hurricanes since 2005 have gone down significantly. Also, the true numbers (rightwinggranny.com) show that the earth has not warmed for more than a decade.

But those plans rarely consider climate change impacts in detail — an omission that could see states become ineligible for the grants after new guidelines take effect early next year. Under FEMA’s updated guidelines, published last week, state disaster plans will only be approved if they adequately describe how the likelihood and intensity of natural hazards could be affected by growing levels of greenhouse gas pollution.

“The risk assessment must provide a summary of the probability of future hazard events,” the new guidelines state. “Probability must include considerations of changing future conditions, including the effects of long-term changes in weather patterns and climate.”

This is more of the government attempting to control the debate. Why does the government support global warming? If the earth is warming at a catastrophic rate, the government will have to take action (thus gaining more control over its citizens). It is interesting that study grants are more like to be given to groups that support global warming than groups that do not.

A lot of people have lost faith in the mainstream media as a source of information. Many of my friends have cancelled their subscriptions to various newspapers. So what is going on? The Internet has given people a chance to do their own research and draw their own opinions. One example of media hype of something that is questionable at best is the way the media has handled the concept of man-made global warming. Despite little scientific evidence to support the claim, our government is shutting down power plants, causing the price of utilities to rise, and trying to control the lives of the American people in ways our founding fathers never intended.

By far, the most rigorous, comprehensive data on global temperatures come from satellite measurements of the atmosphere (mid-troposphere), which is where the greenhouse effect takes place. The measurements started in December 1978 and the temperature estimates are calculated by two independent groups, who closely agree. These data are independently supported by four sets of direct temperature measurements from weather balloons. …

We can see below the direct comparison between 102 model runs and observations.

The differences in the data are obvious. So why are many journalists and people in power trying to convince us that man-made global warming is real? Follow the money. I posted an article in 2010 (rightwinggranny.com) about the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). This was a carbon credit exchange heavily invested in by many political leaders. When cap and trade legislation was defeated, the CCX went out of business and many political leaders lost money. Unfortunately, the people we send to Congress are not always looking out for our interests.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed global warming regulations aren’t just about stemming global temperature rises — according to agency’s chief, they are also about “justice” for “communities of color.”

“Carbon pollution standards are an issue of justice,” said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy in a teleconference call with environmental activists. “If we want to protect communities of color, we need to protect them from climate change.”

McCarthy is referring to the EPA’s proposed rule that would limit carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants. The agency says the rule will not only help fight global warming, but will also improve public health as coal-fired power plants are shuttered. McCarthy, however, put special emphasis on how the rule would reduce asthma rates, which affect African-American children.

Rush Limbaugh said once that if the world were going to end tomorrow, the New York Times headline would be, “World Ends Tomorrow–Women And Children Most Effected.”

If we have any doubt that the climate-control movement was the new home of the communists and socialists, the above statement by Ms. McCarthy should remove all doubt.

The article reports:

“Green For All acknowledges the need to disrupt the current economy, because we understand that our current economy was based upon human trafficking, the exploitation of labor, and violent racism,” according to the group’s website. “We are safe enough to be invited into spaces where power-building groups are not, and radical enough to push a deeply justice-based agenda in those spaces. We are radical enough to partner with grassroots organizations when other national groups are turned away, and enough of an ally to offer resources and support in those spaces.”

The article reminds us that the disruption in the economy would hit the very people the movement claims to be helping the hardest. The higher energy costs would impact small businesses, causing people to lose their jobs. Lower paid and unskilled workers would be impacted. Low income people would be devastated by higher energy costs.

Wealth redistribution never accomplishes anything good. It simply makes more people poor. It also allows certain people who are in control to be immune from having their wealth redistributed. Generally speaking, it is a really bad idea. Socialist and communist countries have a much lower standard of living than countries where people are free and have property rights. To move in the direction of socialism or communism is to move toward poverty–not toward economic equality or freedom.

Yesterday WattsUpWithThat posted an article reminding us that despite alarmist predictions there has been a pause in global warming for 17 years 9 [months] since September 1996. That seems to me to be a rather significant pause.

The article explains that the arrival of el Nino may change these numbers this winter:

In 1990, the IPCC’s central estimate of near-term warming was higher by two-thirds than it is today. Then it was 2.8 C/century equivalent. Now it is just 1.7 Cº – and, as Fig. 3 shows, even that is proving to be a substantial exaggeration.

On the RSS satellite data, there has been no statistically-significant global warming for more than 26 years. None of the models predicted that, in effect, there would be no global warming for a quarter of a century.

New attempts to explain away the severe and growing discrepancy between prediction and reality emerge almost every day. Far too few of the scientists behind the climate scare have yet been willing to admit the obvious explanation – that the models have been programmed to predict far more warming than is now likely.

The long Pause may well come to an end by this winter. An el Niño event has begun. The usual suspects have said it will be a record-breaker, but, as yet, there is too little information to say how much temporary warming it will cause. The temperature spikes caused by the el Niños of 1998, 2007, and 2010 are clearly visible in Figs. 1-3.

Lack of oversight, non-compliance and a lax review process for the State Department’s global climate change programs have led the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) to conclude that program data “cannot be consistently relied upon by decision-makers” and it cannot be ensured “that Federal funds were being spent in an appropriate manner.”

…OIG’s original report found that “OES did not fully implement the guidance for conducting [Data Quality Assessments] to help ensure that the data used in reporting programmatic results were complete, accurate, consistent, and supportable.”

Unfortunately climate science has become a vehicle for poorer countries to shake down richer countries by holding the richer countries responsible for global warming. It is almost impossible to trust any of the data that has been released on climate change. Until the link between politics and science is broken, we really don’t know what the truth is. There are some of us, however, who at this point would not object to a small amount of global warming.

The cabinet minister responsible for fighting the effects of climate change claimed there would be advantages to an increase in temperature predicted by the United Nations including fewer people dying of cold in winter and the growth of certain crops further north.

Owen Paterson told a fringe meeting at the Conservative party conference on Sunday night that predictions by scientists – that there could be major increases in temperature resulting in melting ice caps and worldwide flooding – should not be seen as entirely negative.

…”People get very emotional about this subject and I think we should just accept that the climate has been changing for centuries.

“I think the relief of this latest report is that it shows a really quite modest increase, half of which has already happened. They are talking one to two and a half degrees.

“Remember that for humans, the biggest cause of death is cold in winter, far bigger than heat in summer. It would also lead to longer growing seasons and you could extend growing a little further north into some of the colder areas.

“I actually see this report as something we need to take seriously but I am rather relieved that it is not as catastrophic in its forecast as we had been led to believe early on and what it is saying is something we can adapt to over time and we are very good as a race at adapting,” he said.

Needless to say, those supporting drastic action to combat climate change that has not occurred for the past fifteen years are a bit upset at the comments. The science of climate change is questionable at best. When you listen to the solutions suggested by those offering solutions, you discover that they simply involve the transfer of wealth from democracies to countries ruled by tyrants. Their solutions have nothing to do with climate and a lot to do with taking money from free countries that have developed their resources through the free market and giving it to countries where the money will go to corrupt leaders. Somehow that doesn’t seem like the answer to anything.

There have been many reports that have shown how climate models have vastly overestimated “warming.” For instance, a study in the journal Nature Climate Change “compared 117 climate predictions made in the 1990’s to the actual amount of warming” and 114 of those predictions overestimated the amount of warming. Other studies have found that various climate models used by the United Nations have “forecasted two times more global warming than actually occurred.”

As Breitbart News reported, a group of 50 international scientists released a comprehensive new report, which cited thousands of peer-reviewed articles the United Nations-sponsored panel on climate change ignored, “concluded that evidence now leans against global warming resulting from human-related greenhouse gas emissions.”

There are serious questions about the scientific method behind the global climate studies. So far none of them have actually been accurate even in the short term. If you remember, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted that due to global warming, this year would be one of the most active hurricane seasons on record. Admittedly, the season isn’t over yet, but so far that prediction falls somewhat short of the mark.

As much as I love the idea of global warming, the pictures seem to indicate that it is just not happening. I would like to point out that in the past we have had cycles of both global warming and global cooling. These cycles occurred long before the industrial revolution and were not related to anyone’s carbon footprint.

The article reports:

Some eminent scientists now believe the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century – a process that would expose computer forecasts of imminent catastrophic warming as dangerously misleading.

The disclosure comes 11 months after The Mail on Sunday triggered intense political and scientific debate by revealing that global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.

In March, this newspaper further revealed that temperatures are about to drop below the level that the models forecast with ‘90 per cent certainty’.

The pause – which has now been accepted as real by every major climate research centre – is important, because the models’ predictions of ever-increasing global temperatures have made many of the world’s economies divert billions of pounds into ‘green’ measures to counter climate change.

Those predictions now appear gravely flawed.

The article concludes:

‘The IPCC (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) claims its models show a pause of 15 years can be expected. But that means that after only a very few years more, they will have to admit they are wrong.’

Others are more cautious. Dr Ed Hawkins, of Reading University, drew the graph published by The Mail on Sunday in March showing how far world temperatures have diverged from computer predictions. He admitted the cycles may have caused some of the recorded warming, but insisted that natural variability alone could not explain all of the temperature rise over the past 150 years.

Nonetheless, the belief that summer Arctic ice is about to disappear remains an IPCC tenet, frequently flung in the face of critics who point to the pause.

Yet there is mounting evidence that Arctic ice levels are cyclical. Data uncovered by climate historians show that there was a massive melt in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by intense re-freezes that ended only in 1979 – the year the IPCC says that shrinking began.

Professor Curry said the ice’s behaviour over the next five years would be crucial, both for understanding the climate and for future policy. ‘Arctic sea ice is the indicator to watch,’ she said.

The bottom line here is that we simply don’t understand the earth’s climate cycles. We know they exist, but we don’t know how they work or if human activity impacts them. I am in favor of clean water and clean air, but I am not in favor of crippling economic growth for faulty science. We need to learn balance, and we need to realize that much of the panic we have heard regarding global warming has to do with the desire on the part of some world leaders to transfer wealth from successful free countries into the hands of third-world tyrants. The route to economic success for any third-world country has to include freedom for its people. If there is no incentive, there will be no economic growth.

One of my favorite websites is WattsUpWithThat.com. It is a bit scientific for me, but it has one of the most down-to-earth, practical views on global warming I can find. Yesterday WattsUpWithThat posted an article with their take on the current heat wave. The article included this picture:

The comment underneath the picture was blunt:

This is weather, not climate. It is caused by a persistent blocking high pressure pattern. In a day or two, that red splotch over the eastern USA will be gone.

Every summer temperatures climb. There may be climate change due to climate cycles that have been with us since the Earth was formed.,but we have had heat waves since I was a small child (back in the age of dinosaurs). There was a recent article noting that there has been global warming on Mars. If this is the case, I would tend to look at the sun as the culprit–not carbon dioxide or SUV‘s.

In case you are like charts better than pictures, this is the weather in June over the past 30 years or so:

On June 15th, WattsUpWithThat posted a graph of climate predictions made in 1988 contrasted with what has actually occurred. This is the graph:

Figure 1: Temperature forecast Hansen’s group from the year 1988.The various scenarios are 1.5% CO 2 increase (blue), constant increase in CO 2 emissions (green) and stagnant CO 2 emissions (red).In reality, the increase in CO 2 emissions by as much as 2.5%, which would correspond to the scenario above the blue curve.The black curve is the ultimate real-measured temperature (rolling 5-year average).Hansen’s model overestimates the temperature by 1.9 ° C, which is a whopping 150% wrong.Figure supplemented byHansen et al.(1988) .

As the chart clearly shows, there was definitely something wrong with their calculations.

The article concludes:

The CO 2 emissions since 2000 to about 2.5 percent per year has increased, so that we would expect according to the Hansen paper a temperature rise, which should be stronger than in model A. Figure 1 shows the three Hansen scenarios and the real measured global temperature curve are shown. The protruding beyond Scenario A arrow represents the temperature value that the Hansen team would have predicted on the basis of a CO 2 increase of 2.5%. Be increased according to the Hansen’s forecast, the temperature would have compared to the same level in the 1970s by 1.5 ° C. In truth, however, the temperature has increased by only 0.6 ° C.

It is apparent that the next to it by the Hansen group in 1988 modeled temperature prediction by about 150%. It is extremely regrettable that precisely this type of modeling of our politicians is still regarded as a reliable climate prediction.

This is more science than I am comfortable dealing with, but the bottom line is simple–they got it wrong. The politicians in many countries are still using these faulty predictions as an excuse to grab more power and limit the ability of their citizens to prosper. It’s time we held them accountable for their reliance on faulty information. The global warming debate was never about saving the planet–it was about more government control.

It exposes the lie in the controversial data collected by the East Anglia Project, NASA, and other organizations that have acted as advocates for action based on anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

The article points out:

But then look what happens in the past 11 years in the bottom chart. Despite the fact that the world’s nations continue to spew CO2 with no significant decline (except perhaps in the Great Recession period of 2008-9), the temperature record is remarkably stable. In fact, it looks similar to the period between 1945 and 1970 on the top chart. If global temperature increases really correlated directly to CO2 emissions, we wouldn’t see this at all; we’d see ever-escalating rates of increase in global temperatures, which is exactly what the AGW climate models predicted at the turn of the century. They were proven wrong.

Mr. Morrissey concludes:

Even perfect correlation doesn’t prove causation, and this is far from being perfect correlation. AGW scientists have still failed to prove that CO2 is responsible for the moderate rise in temperatures, nor have they proven their hypothesis that the rise is irreversible, or even bad. As I pointed out to my friend, Greenland hosted a farming community for over 200 years before getting swallowed in ice in a global-cooling period that helped spread disease, death, and starvation throughout Europe. If Greenland once again becomes farmland, then we might be entering a somewhat more remarkable climate period in human history, but until then this is more properly referred to as weather.

The global warming movement is based on two things–many high-powered politicians in countries around the world (including America) are highly invested in ‘green energy’ and if they can convince the world to switch to green energy, they will make a bundle of money. Secondly, if you look at the Kyoto treaties and other global warming solutions, you will see that they are aimed at taking money away from countries with strong economies and giving it to countries with corruption, graft and weak economies. The major polluters of the world (India and China) are not bound by these treaties.

We all need to take care of our environment, but we need to balance taking care of the earth and taking care of the people on the earth.